Stories by John R. Platt

On Saturday, June 21 one of the Republic of Namibia’s rare desert elephants was felled by a hunter’s rifle. Unlike most of the other elephants that die on any given day in Africa, this particular elephant was slain legally.

What do manatees and bureaucracy have in common? They both have a tendency to move slowly—sometimes painfully slowly. In Florida manatees’ own lethargy puts the animals at risk of being killed or injured by the speedboats that zip through the state’s waterways.

A massive new study of Japan’s native plants reveals an extinction crisis in the making. The study examined 1,618 threatened Japanese vascular plant species, most of which can be only be found in extremely limited ranges and many of which already face shrinking populations.

Populations of California’s already endangered tricolored blackbirds (Agelaius tricolor) have fallen by 44 percent since 2011 and 64 percent since 2008, according to a survey coordinated by the University of California, Davis.

Most efforts to rescue threatened species from the risk of extinction involve decades of hard work. Even our country’s national symbol, the iconic bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), required more than 40 years before it had recovered enough to leave the protection of the Endangered Species Act.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) last week announced that the world’s rarest and smallest sloth could deserve protection under the Endangered Species Act (pdf).

Nautilus shells are big business. The U.S. imports more than 100,000 of the iconic mollusk shells every year, according to a recent study by the U.S.

Life is tough if you’re a northern quoll (Dasyurus hallucatus). These rare, cat-sized Australian marsupials don’t have very long life spans—especially males, which tend to die after their first mating experience when less than a year old.

“It’s a strange world. Let’s keep it that way.”—Warren Ellis You can find some pretty weird things when you go poking around in holes in remote parts of the globe.

Sometimes research into one question reveals the answer to another. In July 2012 Catherine Hughes and Julie Broken-Brow, students at the University of Queensland in Australia, were in Papua New Guinea studying how the region’s tiny microbats responded to sustainable logging of their forest homes.

Imagine living underground for six years waiting for water. That might seem like a challenge, but it’s just a normal part of the life cycle for the African helmeted terrapin.

Eleven hundred kilometers off the coast of Mexico, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, sits a tiny hunk of rock and sand known as Clarion Island.

Fifteen years ago the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) acknowledged that a rare plant called the Georgia aster (Symphyotrichum georgianum) deserved and needed protection under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

Scientists in Australia have warned that we’d better get hopping and slow down climate change if we want to prevent the world’s smallest kangaroo from going extinct.

Say “Hello, my baby. Hello, my darling...” to 14 newly described frog species that kick and dance like Michigan J. Frog from the classic Warner Brothers animated cartoon, One Froggy Evening.

In 1828, in a short paper in the journal Spicilegia Zoologica, British zoologist John Edward Gray reported six “new and undescribed” marine animals, among them a small dolphin found off southern Africa’s Atlantic coast.

How do you gather information about a bird species that spends 99 percent or more of its time at sea? Until recently, there wasn’t an easy answer.

A sea turtle’s life begins in darkness. After about 60 days of incubation inside their eggs, turtle hatchlings use a temporary tooth called a caruncle to break out of their shells.

Mathematically speaking, the creation of the massive Balbina Hydroelectric Dam in Brazil should have been a boon to the giant river otters (Pteronura brasiliensis) that live in the area.

One of the most delightful bird species of the Galápagos has almost completely stopped breeding there. According to a new study published this week in the journal Avian Conservation and Ecology, blue-footed boobies (Sula nebouxii) have seen a population drop of more than 50 percent over the past two decades.

The Mercury Islands tusked weta (Motuweta isolate) isn’t exactly a thing of beauty. These massive New Zealand insects can reach more than seven centimeters in length, including the impressive tusks in front of their jaws that they use to push their prey around.

Alligator snapping turtles look pretty intimidating. These massive, prehistoric-looking reptiles can reach more than 66 centimeters in length and weigh more than 100 kilograms.

The news for bats in the U.S. keeps getting worse. Last week conservation officials announced that the bat-killing white-nose syndrome (WNS) has been found in Michigan and Wisconsin.